Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUPS

  Groups not only shape who we are and what we do. They can also distort our perception of objective facts. Muzafer Sherif’s now-classic Robbers Cave experiment offered an early demonstration. In the 1950s, twenty-two boys around the age of eleven were brought to a deserted camp in Oklahoma for three weeks and divided into two roughly similar cohorts, who immediately named themselves the Eagles and Rattlers.

  For the first week, the two groups were kept completely separate, but in the second stage they were asked to compete in a series of physical games like baseball and tug-of-war. Intense group rivalry—replete with name calling, flag burning, and nighttime raids—immediately flared. At this point, the researchers conducted an experiment. A bean-collecting contest was held, after which each boy handed the beans he had gathered to the counselor to be counted. The counselor then pretended to pour each boy’s beans onto a projector screen, instead pouring the same dummy set of beans onto the screen each time. The boys from both groups then estimated how many beans they thought each boy had collected by looking at the screen. Though the number of beans on the projector remained exactly the same, the boys consistently overestimated the performance of their own group members compared to the performance of out-group members.

  Can intelligence or education overcome these distortive tendencies? It appears that just the opposite is true. In one recent study, Dan Kahan of Yale Law School and his coauthors took a pool of more than a thousand subjects, testing them first for their political leanings and their “numeracy” (basically, math skills plus their ability to analyze data and draw valid inferences). He then gave all the subjects a tricky problem requiring analysis of (fictional) quantitative data. Some subjects were asked a politically neutral question: whether a new skin cream made a rash better or worse. They were shown a table with numbers that would allow them to evaluate the claim. Predictably, subjects with stronger numeracy skills tended to come up with the right answer more often.

  Other subjects, however, were given the exact same numbers but were asked whether a gun ban increased or decreased crime. Subjects who saw these numbers demonstrated political bias. Those with liberal, Democratic leanings tended to conclude that the gun ban decreased crime; those with conservative, Republican leanings tended to conclude that the gun ban increased crime.

  But here’s the kicker: those with stronger numeracy skills demonstrated more bias. They were more likely to err in the direction of their political predispositions, possibly because of their superior ability to manipulate data. In other words, Kahan found that the smarter you are with numbers, the more likely you are to manipulate evidence to conform to your group’s core beliefs. This finding has now been replicated for several different hot-button factual controversies—for example, climate change—and extended beyond numeracy. The better informed people are, and the better educated, the more polarized they tend to be on politically controversial factual issues, and the more stubbornly they manipulate new facts to support their tribe’s worldview.

  Another way group membership affects our judgment is through pressure to conform. In Solomon Asch’s landmark 1951 study, subjects were seated at a table with six confederates—fake participants who were actually part of the experiment team. The participants were shown a card with a line on it. Then they were shown another card with three very different lines and asked to point to the one that was the same length as the first line. The answer should have been obvious. But after watching the six plants choose a patently wrong answer, 75 percent of the real subjects went along with the others and picked the wrong line too.

  Stanford University professor Robb Willer extended the Asch conformity analysis to investigate how incorrect information can be propagated, even when in-group members know it’s bogus. To foster in-group bonds, Willer created the illusion that subjects were part of a group with a knack for sophisticated wine tasting (by reporting overblown credentials for the other members). Participants were asked to taste two wines that were actually from the same bottle. Subjects were then placed at solo computer stations. Each was told that they would be the fifth out of six subjects to rate the wines. Each got to see the first four responses, which were not actually from their peers but created by a computer. All of the computer ratings insisted that one of the identical wines was far inferior to the other. Over half the subjects conformed to social pressure, agreeing with these fake ratings. The subjects then received a final fake response—a “deviant” one that actually spoke the truth (finding the two wines indistinguishable). Subjects were then asked to judge the wine-rating abilities of what they thought were the other group members.

  The results were fascinating. When privately asked to rank their fellow wine tasters, the conforming subjects revealed that they actually favored the “deviant”—suggesting that in reality they too had found the wines indistinguishable. But when asked to publicly express their views, the subjects punished the “deviant” by ranking him lower. In other words, the subjects publicly enforced a group-consensus norm they didn’t actually agree with. As Willer points out, this type of conformity is especially dangerous because, “through a cascade of self-reinforcing social pressure,” false realities can be accepted as true, while truth tellers are punished and individuals become wedded to their own hypocrisy. These cascades can “trap a population into worshipping a naked emperor, without the possibility of a child breaking the spell.”

  Group identification can powerfully reinforce these conformity effects. In experiments similar to Asch’s landmark study, subjects have been found to conform much more when presented with judgments said to come from members of an in-group, and much less when judgments are said to come from out-group members. And it’s not just that people tend to think what their fellow tribe members think. They will do what their fellow tribe members do—even to the point of savagery.

  In the words of Gustave Le Bon, the nineteenth-century French social psychologist who essentially invented crowd psychology, an individual who is part of a group “descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.” By himself, a person “may be a cultivated individual”; in a group, “[h]e possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” An individual who acts together with others in a group acquires “a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint.”

  Fanaticism fueled by the disinhibiting effects of group identity almost certainly has a physiological basis, although we are just beginning to understand it. Describing young male ISIS fighters racing by on trucks, “black flags waving,” fists clenched, exhilarated “from the slaughter of infidels,” psychologist and neuroscientist Ian Robertson writes that the militants are experiencing “a biochemical high from a combination of the bonding hormone oxytocin and the dominance hormone testosterone. Much more than cocaine or alcohol, these natural drugs lift mood, induce optimism and energise aggressive action on the part of the group.” Group bonding, Robertson notes, increases oxytocin levels, which spurs “a greater tendency to demonise and de-humanise the out-group” and which physiologically “anaesthetizes” the empathy one might otherwise feel. “It is groups,” Robertson concludes, “which are capable of savagery, much more than any individual alone.”

  This is the darkest side of the tribal instinct: the ease with which we dehumanize outsiders and the satisfaction we derive from doing so. Strong group affiliations cause people to regard out-group members as “all alike” (an out-group homogeneity effect), to characterize them with negative traits or dangerous proclivities, and to view them as less than human. Individuals are also much more likely to attribute human emotions (like admiration, sorrow, or disillusion) to in-group members, while seeing only “primary,” more animal emotions (like anger, surprise, fear) in out-group members. These effects have been found to exist between Belgians (in-group) and Arabs (out-group); whites
(in-group) and blacks (out-group); and Canadians (in-group) and Afghans (out-group).

  Most disturbingly, such effects appear, sometimes in extreme form, in young children. Consider two recent studies about in-group and out-group attitudes of Arab and Jewish kids in Israel. In the first, Jewish children were asked to draw both a “typical Jewish” man and a “typical Arab” man. The researchers found that even among preschoolers, Arabs were portrayed more negatively and as “significantly more aggressive” than Jews. Likewise, in a 2011 study, Arab high school students in Israel were asked for their reactions to fictitious incidents involving the accidental (non-war-related) deaths of either an Arab or Jewish child, for example due to electrocution or a biking accident. Roughly 64 percent of the subjects expressed sadness about the death of the Arab child, whereas only 5 percent expressed sadness about the death of the Jewish child. Indeed, almost 70 percent said they felt “happy” or “very happy” about the Jewish child’s death.

  THE BANALIZATION OF EVIL

  Islam Yaken grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Cairo. He graduated from a private high school and Ain Shams University. Old friends remember him as “funny but respectful” and recall that his dreams were ordinary: to build his own business as a fitness trainer and “get a hot girlfriend.” Yaken worked hard, offering fitness lessons at local gyms and posting online exercise videos. “Every guy dreams of having a six-pack so he can take his shirt off at the beach or at the pool and have people check him out,” he told his YouTube followers. But Yaken struggled. He couldn’t land a steady job in Egypt’s depressed economy; his business foundered.

  In 2012, after losing a close friend in a motorcycle accident, he met an ultraconservative sheikh. Previously unreligious, Yaken grew a beard and became intensely devout, refusing to talk to women and forcing himself, out of shame and anger, not to look at them. When a coup forced the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, Yaken became disillusioned with Egypt’s political system and left for Syria without telling his friends or family. They learned of his transformation when his Twitter feed began broadcasting gruesome photos of decapitated heads in a basket, rants about the glory of ISIS—and workout videos for jihadists. Now a “poster boy” (and personal trainer) for ISIS, Yaken has been pictured on horseback with a machine gun and scimitar. In a ghastly way, ISIS allowed Yaken to realize his career ambitions and lifted him to a status and stature he lacked in Egypt.

  Members of terrorist groups don’t become killers and beheaders overnight. They are typically drawn in through a gradual process of socialization, indoctrination, and radicalization—with group identity and dynamics playing a critical role at every juncture.

  Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian who converted to Islam in his teens, is one of the thousands of Europeans who left comfortable homes to join ISIS in Syria. Like Yaken, Jejoen seemed like an ordinary teenager but “fell down in a black hole” after he was eliminated from a reality television contest (in which he danced like Michael Jackson), then dumped by his girlfriend. Enter Sharia4Belgium, a radical Islamist group based in Antwerp committed to turning Belgium into an Islamic state. (There’s also Sharia4Holland and Islam4UK.) Led by a militant preacher, Fouad Belkacem, with ties to ISIS, Sharia4Belgium gave Jejoen an instant tribe (members of the group call one another “brothers”), a sense of importance and duty, role models to admire, and enemies to hate.

  Over twenty-four intensive weeks, Jejoen and his new brothers listened to archived lectures by a “martyred” imam that reduced the world to Muslims versus infidels and watched videos that portrayed jihadists fighting in Afghanistan and Chechnya as “selfless heroes defending Islam against corrupt crusaders.” On one occasion, they watched a video of a beheading. They discussed where they wanted to fight in the future, perhaps Libya or Somalia. “You sit for months in a group in which jihad is considered quite normal,” Jejoen later recalled. The recruits also received martial arts training, kickboxing lessons, and a lecture on “the methodology to overthrow the regimes,” all of which gave them a sense of empowerment, control, and self-esteem. The last four weeks of the program were devoted to the importance of loyalty to fellow Muslims.

  Along with a few of his brothers, Jejoen eventually made his way to the small town of Kafr Hamra in Syria, just outside Aleppo, where aspiring European jihadists were housed in a walled villa with an indoor swimming pool—or, if they were really lucky, in a place apparently seized from a Syrian government official called “the palace,” which had a rooftop pool and an orchard the size of a football field. The leader of Jejoen’s team was another Belgian, Houssien Elouassaki, who at twenty-one was essentially the training camp’s second-in-command for Europeans. “It is something incredible,” said Houssien’s brother in a wiretapped telephone call. “He is the youngest emir in the world.”

  For disaffected young Muslims like Yaken, Jejoen, and Houssien, becoming a jihadi is a big step up: from anonymous nobody to righteous warrior who commands respect, wields power, has an opportunity to rise—and, not least, is attractive to women.

  There’s no doubt about it: Brand Caliphate made itself cool and surprisingly effective with young Muslim women. ISIS has been a shrewd marketer, filling its social media with images of confident, strapping warriors carrying AK-47s—the jihadist equivalent of Abercrombie models. Hundreds of Western women have traveled to Syria and Iraq to become the wives of ISIS fighters. ISIS wives stood guard as their husbands raped captive Yazidi (non-Muslim) girls held as sex slaves. For many young Muslim women in the UK and Europe, ISIS managed to make terrorism hip. “In this world,” as one Middle East reporter put it, “the counterculture is conservative. Islam is punk rock. The head scarf is liberating. Beards are sexy.”

  More than any other terrorist organization in recent history, ISIS—which became “the world’s richest terrorist group” in 2014 and at one point was making millions of dollars a day from oil, taxation, and extortion—has offered young, alienated Muslims a sense of excitement and romance, a link to a grand history, and a chance to be part of a winning team. As one fighter in northern Syria put it, “We have here mujahideen from Russia, America, the Philippines, China, Germany, Belgium, Sudan, India and Yemen and other places. They are here because this [is] what the Prophet said and promised, the Grand Battle is happening.”

  Like the caliphates of yore, ISIS has “court poets,” including the celebrity poetess Ahlam al-Nasr, who married the Vienna-born ISIS bigwig Abu Usama al-Gharib to great social media fanfare, making them the “it” couple of terrorism—a “jihadi power couple.” Originally from Syria, al-Nasr sided with the 2011 demonstrations against President Assad, and many of her poems vividly capture group pain:

  Their bullets shattered our brains like an

  earthquake,

  even strong bones cracked then broke.

  They drilled our throats and scattered

  our limbs—

  it was like an anatomy lesson!

  They hosed the streets as blood still

  ran

  like streams crashing down from the

  clouds.

  After ISIS captured Mosul, al-Nasr published a triumphant poem, in traditional Arabic meter, which spread online like wildfire:

  Ask Mosul, city of Islam, about the

  lions—

  how their fierce struggle brought

  liberation.

  The land of glory has shed its humiliation

  and defeat

  and put on the raiment of splendor.

  Known as the “Poetess of the Islamic State,” al-Nasr is clearly gifted; her mother, a former law professor, recalls that al-Nasr “was born with a dictionary in her mouth.” She palpably feels and empathizes deeply; her elegies to fallen mujahedin are filled with aching beauty. But the tribe she has chosen is ISIS—she wrote a thirty-page essay defending the caliphate’s decision to burn the Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh alive.

  Very few people, no ma
tter how angry, impoverished, or degraded, actually engage in terrorist activity. For most of us, it is incomprehensible that seemingly normal, likeable young men and women, often from loving families, could blow themselves up or participate gleefully in gruesome beheadings. How could a poet of deep sensibility rhapsodize burning a man alive?

  The tribal instinct makes this behavior intelligible. In its darkest manifestations, tribalism desensitizes by dehumanizing. It can distort reality on a massive scale, by motivating people to see the world in a way that favors their group commitments. Through the pressure to conform, group identity induces people to do things they never would have considered on their own. Individual responsibility is merged into and corrupted by group identity, and people become capable of engaging in and celebrating atrocious acts of brutality.

  THE PUZZLE OF POVERTY

  It’s difficult to avoid the sense that poverty must play a role in producing terrorism. Indeed, it’s often said—for example, by Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014—that poverty is “the root cause of terrorism.” But many terrorist leaders have come from relatively privileged backgrounds—Osama bin Laden is said to have inherited $25 million, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has a Ph.D. Moreover, numerous studies have purportedly “disproven” the link between poverty and extremism—by showing, for example, that low per capita national income is not associated with terrorism and that individual poverty does not predict the likelihood of engaging in terrorist acts.

  What these studies overlook is the critical importance of tribal politics and group identity. Of course poverty doesn’t always lead to violence. The key to understanding extremism lies not in poverty as such, but in group inequality.

  Every major terrorist movement of the last several decades—from the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka to Chechen separatists in Russia to Nigeria’s Boko Haram to the militant Islamic movements of the Middle East—arose in conditions of group inequality, group disempowerment, group humiliation, and group hatred. Poverty alone does not create terrorism. But when stark inequalities track deep, preexisting racial, ethnic, religious, or sectarian divides, intense feelings of injustice, resentment, and frustration will become widespread, catalyzed by all the group-psychological phenomena just explored. These are the breeding-ground conditions of terrorist violence.